


The Ferryman

by peatmoss



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Ghosts, Low Chaos Corvo Attano, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 06:14:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28346697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peatmoss/pseuds/peatmoss
Summary: The night Corvo returns from Holger Square, Samuel Beechworth dreams of mist on the Wrenhaven and bodies flickering like flames in the wind.He ferries Death, and so he will ferry the dead as well.
Relationships: Corvo Attano & Samuel Beechworth
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	The Ferryman

The night Corvo returns from Holger Square, Samuel has a dream.

He’s sitting at the tiller of the _Amaranth_ , bobbing gently on the dark ripples of the Wrenhaven’s surface. He knows it’s the Wrenhaven in the way that all knowledge comes in dreams, sourceless and certain. Heavy gray fog curls around the little riverboat, caressing the surface of the water with wispy fingers that knit together above him to form the idea of a uniform gray-blue sky. He can’t see more than an arm’s length from the boat. The air is cool and humid and utterly silent save for the lapping waves, the gentle thrum of the _Amaranth's_ idling motor, and a deep, resonant humming at the edge of his hearing that reminds him of the whalesong he’d heard decades ago at sea on quiet nights.

Across from him sit four people. Two are Overseers, straight-backed and unspeaking, swaying with the rocking of the river and unreadable beneath their masks. One has a narrow, clean-edged hole through his clothes directly above his heart. The other’s collar hangs loose, revealing a thin red line arcing across his neck. Neither of them acknowledge Samuel when he introduces himself. He does not ask why they are in his boat or how they booked passage: he knows with that same dream-certainty that these men and their two companions are his passengers simply because they need to be, and so it is. 

The third person is High Overseer Thaddeus Campbell. He is missing his right arm above the elbow and his blood-red jacket is torn across the front. His chest beneath is a combination of ripped flesh and clean cuts. He stands out like a crimson wound in the mist of the river and twitches subtly, his dark eyes darting from his feet to the river and occasionally to Samuel’s face where they linger for a moment of false sight before moving on. He does not acknowledge Samuel either, though his lips move constantly in a silent mimicry of speech. Samuel wonders if he is speaking Strictures.

The last is a maid with a hole in her throat. She stares unwaveringly out into the fog with the fingers of one callused hand wrapped delicately in the fabric of her apron. Like the others, her form flickers and warps faintly at the edges like the shards of a slowly shattering mirror. For a sickening moment she looks like Callista.

These people are all his passengers, and so Samuel knows that he must take them to their destination. He is the _Amaranth's_ boatman, after all. He feels a pull deep in his chest and looks out to where the horizon would be, if he could see more than a few feet out. Nevertheless, he knows exactly where he must travel. He smooths his knit-gloved palm over the well worn brass of the throttle, takes the engine from idle into gear, and steers to follow the compulsion into the mist. It gradually thins as they progress, revealing shattered spines of dark gray rock emerging from the black depths around them before they’re swallowed again by fog in the _Amaranth’s_ wake.

Samuel doesn’t remember how the dream ends, but he wakes up in his shack at dawn with the sure knowledge that all four passengers had disembarked. The maid had gone last, lingering. He cannot picture what the shore looked like, despite the clarity of the rest of the experience. 

When he walks down to the boat landing to watch the sun rise and glint across the wet cobbles, the lingering traces of last night’s fog seem thin and unreal compared to the shrouded, black-watered Wrenhaven he’d found himself on. The burbling of the waves sounds tinny and flat and all he can hear past them is sawing grasshoppers in the reeds. By the time he turns back to the pub, he isn’t so certain that it was a dream at all.

  
  
  
  


He does talk to Corvo the next time he has him in his boat. 

“I just don’t think it’s right,” Samuel says, “for someone to die for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and nothing more. I know it might not be my place to say, but by those rights you’d never have made it out of Coldridge, Corvo.”

The bluntness of how it comes out startles Samuel just as much as it does Corvo, it seems. Corvo looks at him for a long moment with his lips slightly parted before furrowing his brows and nodding solemnly. 

Samuel lets the silence rest there until they draw near to the landing back at Clavering and he shares what he’s heard recently about the Golden Cat and its clientele. When Corvo clenches his fist and vanishes, the flash of blue is like light filtering through mist and the whispers left in his wake speak like water does. Samuel hunkers down to wait for Lady Emily to the distant sound of plague victims' corpses falling into the river.

  
  
  
  


Samuel dreams again that night of sitting at the _Amaranth's_ tiller, the misty Wrenhaven feeling both half-there and more real than anything else Samuel has ever experienced. Deep songs resonate faintly beneath the hull and moisture fills his lungs. He doesn't wonder how he finds himself here a second time, because in the dreaming moment it's self evident. He has passengers.

He looks up to find only two, which is the best he supposes he can hope for. They have the same face. Their wounds differ, the man in white sporting the pale slash of a cut throat and the man in black with two barely visible slits through his neck from a stab wound, but Samuel cannot tell which is Morgan and which is Custis. He doesn’t try to greet them because he already knows that they are incapable of acknowledging him in return. Besides, nobles like them would want nothing to do with men like him. They sway and flicker and stare into the swirling blue-gray expanse, and Samuel puts the boat in gear.

  
  
  
  


When he dreams after taking Corvo to the Estate District, the waking part of Samuel’s mind had been expecting it. Three times cannot be chance.

Lady Boyle sits primly in her seat with a run-through heart, the deep shadows of her marble-white mask defining her figure as the rest of her seems to blend into the fog. She is accompanied by a slack-faced guardsman and an Overseer with a smashed crank box slung across his chest. Her fingers twitch while they travel through the fog as though she's playing piano on her knees, out of rhythm with the stochastic splintering of her form.

Samuel wakes to pre-dawn light filtering softly though the cracks in his shack's walls and asks himself _why._

  
  
  
  


His hands tremble as he takes the small brown bottle Martin hands him, unlabeled and stoppered with a rubber cork. 

“Do you understand, Samuel?” Havelock asks.

“Yes, sir,” the boatman nods. He masks his dawning horror with the rote expression of bland subservience that powerful people expect from men like him. His cautious hope for something different for Dunwall after Corvo takes care of the Lord Regent sours and curdles. He thinks of Lady Emily, drawing pictures of Corvo on the rocks by the river and hiding them when he comes down to work on the _Amaranth's_ engine, but not before he can catch a glimpse of what she’s written on the pages. He cannot do this.

“See to it, then,” Pendleton clips out.

Samuel leaves.

  
  
  
  


He beds down that night in the shell of an apartment at the water’s edge far from the Hound Pits. It’s too dangerous to go back now after having made a cursory appearance to prove to Havelock he’d done what he’d been ordered to and to leave a note for Callista. He cannot risk it, not with the cold glint in the Admiral’s eye of a man with little remorse to spare. Tomorrow he’ll start searching for Corvo along the riverbanks. It would be no use in the dark.

The moaning of weepers drifts hauntingly up through the silent night from the next block south, but they’ve stayed clear of this building with its boarded windows and crumbling barricades. Corpses float bloated and rotting in the reeds next to where he’d moored the _Amaranth_ and covered her with old sheets and vegetation. The stench is awful. More will drift ashore tomorrow and the next day and the next, an endless flotilla replacing those whose bones are finally taken by the mud.

Samuel remembers what the Wrenhaven was like before the plague arrived and it became a dead river in a dead city. Even the clear mornings are mostly silent now, as though Dunwall’s survivors are collectively holding their breath in the stead of those who have already choked their last. He yearns for the easy passing of merchant traffic, the dawn exodus of fishing vessels sounding their horns, and for taking a fare without anxiously searching his passenger’s eyes for blood first. On some days the _Amaranth_ is the only vessel out on the water for hours on end.

He drinks half an elixir from the stash he’d ferreted away and eats a tin of whale meat before wrapping himself up to sleep. It takes a long time for him to drift off, anxious visions of Corvo and Emily and Callista and the other workers at the Hound Pits cycling through his thoughts. Corvo’s stricken gaze from where he’d collapsed on the floor of the attic room haunts him. He desperately hopes he’s done the right thing by laying him in a dory to float on the tide in Rudshore and ride the diluted poison out. 

At least he’ll be spared that other river tonight, Samuel thinks, because Corvo had stayed his blade and chosen to damn Burrows by airing his sins rather than by running him through. He’s already carrying enough worries into sleep as it is.

He is wrong.

Samuel opens his eyes to find himself seated at the tiller of the _Amaranth_ with fog curling around his shoulders, blue light scattering through it from nowhere as it always does here on this Wrenhaven. The boat’s engine idles smoothly by his hip. He is confused for a long moment as to why he is here before he realizes that it’s because he has a passenger, of course. They’re humming hesitant snatches of a southern folk song, trailing off tunelessly before restarting again and again. None of the others have made sound before. He turns to see who it is and blanches in shock.

“No,” he gasps. “Corvo?”

Corvo slumps on the bench at the stern with his head hung low and his fingers white-knuckled around the wrist of his marked hand. His eyes dart about like Campbell’s had, frenetic and unseeing while he hums, and his form shivers and flickers at its edges like a mirage on water. Purple tinges his lips and his face is gray and ashen, no wounds save those that had already been patched.

“Corvo,” Samuel calls, loud this time, his strained voice breaking on the last syllable. The weight of the mist eats the sound as soon as it leaves his mouth.

The man twitches as though startled from a doze and looks up, the heretical black slashes on his hand flaring dimly with blue and gold. The whalesong from below rises and converges into a fractured chord in time with its pulsing and his form solidifies somewhat. It takes a long, long time for Corvo’s eyes to focus on him.

“Samuel?” Corvo asks distantly, as though speaking in his sleep.

“I’m here,” Samuel chokes out, nauseous. He’d been certain that Corvo was strong enough. He’d been sure he’d gotten the dilution right. He’d thought- 

The familiar compulsion rolls over him, pulling his gaze to the horizon he knows lies through the mist and his hands to the throttle and the tiller. He breathes in sharply and fists them against his thighs instead. 

“Samuel,” Corvo says, more present now. He slips to the side as a low swell rocks them, reacting sluggishly to steady himself with a hand on the bench, then pushes his overgrown hair back from his face. He takes in the black waves and the boat and the mists and Samuel where he sits grim and tense by the engine. His expression furrows into wide-eyed bewilderment. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“It’s the Wrenhaven,” Samuel answers automatically. “Of course I should be.”

“What? No,” Corvo shakes his head. “You don’t understand. This is the _Void_. Only the Outsider should be here.” He trails off when he glances down, then lifts a hand to examine it. The very edges of his fingers flicker. When Corvo looks back up his face is a rictus of horror.

“Corvo, I-”

“No,” he breathes. “I’m not done, Samuel, I can’t go. Emily needs me. She can’t lose me too, not after her mother. And Havelock, Havelock will-” The man hunches over with a pained snarl, breathing heavily and shaking with his fingers knotted in his hair. 

Samuel sets his jaw and reaches for the controls with trembling hands. “It’s alright, Corvo. I’ll get you back where you need to be, don’t you worry.” He throws the tiller out and forces the engine into reverse, turning the _Amaranth_ in a wide semicircle over the inky waves. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry.”

He guides them away from where all the bones in his body are thrumming for him to go. If there is one shore then there must also be its opposite, and Corvo can disembark where he booked his passage from. Samuel is certain of this. He knows the currents and inlets of the Wrenhaven like the shapes of of his own scarred fingers, after all. The farther they go the deeper his marrow aches for him to turn back and the harder he has to concentrate to keep the _Amaranth_ steady against the compulsion of his hands.

“Look at me, Corvo,” Samuel says whenever Corvo starts his broken humming again, the Outsider’s mark sputtering out and his eyes beginning to glaze over. The man comes back with a twitch and Samuel holds him there with eye contact, steering by feel alone. He tightens his white-knuckled hold on the tiller as the fog thickens and everything starts to blur. He will not turn. He refuses.

Samuel wakes up gasping in the dark and he knows he succeeded.

  
  
  
  


He spends the next day combing the riverbanks for Corvo’s dark hair and the gilt embroidery of his coat but finds nothing. That night, the _Amaranth_ is full.

The strange passengers fill every bench and perch even on the rails, weighing the boat down low into the water. They are all dressed alike in long gloves and dark hooded jackets, their faces obscured by whaling masks with lenses that manage to shine even in the diffuse light of the fog bank. Some are missing limbs. Others bear subtler wounds, but they all stare directly forward in their places where they sway or tap their fingers or shift their legs. Samuel swallows thickly and draws back in his seat when faced with their sheer numbers and what that means Corvo has done. He does not want to touch them and they are crowded so very, very close.

“This place, it… This place… Where is my mother?”

The deep-voiced man who speaks is braced with an elbow on his knee atop the engine casing. He wears no mask over his heavily scarred face and his coat is a deep, bloody red. He stares away at the waves that rock them as Samuel slowly puts the boat into gear.

“She had so many names,” he continues. “All spoken softly. I didn’t know which one to use.”

“Who are you?” Samuel asks firmly, and wraps his hand around the tiller. He cannot deliver his strange passengers without trying to understand who they are, though he doubts any of them will answer him.

To his surprise, the murmuring man jerks at his words and light shines from his gloved hand just as it had from Corvo’s. His body ceases its flaring and splintering and as he solidifies all the other passengers crane their masks to look at him as though magnetized. They remain deathly quiet save for the creaking of their leather coats.

“An assassin,” their leader finally says into the Void. “A killer.” He looks down at Samuel and reaches up idly to feel his own throat. The masks surrounding them track the movement. Samuel sees the bloodless gash there now, razor clean and deep through the arteries.

“He took my life.”

“Yes,” Samuel answers.

A soft smile draws across the man’s face that never reaches his sharp, cold eyes. Samuel feels a shiver run down his spine at his lucid acceptance of death.

“I deserved it,” the man says. “It was his right. I was a fool to hope for mercy after everything I’ve done.” He places his glowing hand back on the engine top. “When they dragged him away with his Empress’s blood on his face I knew he’d come for me, if he could. I used to think I was special before, when I used to kneel at the Outsider’s shrines. That I could change things. But it’s always been a lie.”

“You’re Daud,” Samuel realizes grimly. His morbid curiosity settles into to judgement and he thinks could see, maybe, why Corvo has done what he has to these men. But it still turns his stomach.

“The Knife of Dunwall,” Daud smiles bitterly in reply. “But not for much longer.” 

The assassin turns his back on Samuel and returns to watching the dark waters as they motor farther towards their destination. Samuel says nothing more, guiding the _Amaranth_ past a fractured slab of stone that rises from the mist at their left. He will do what he is called to do. The eerie light from the man’s mark slowly fades and his form begins to flicker again like a flame in the wind. His men’s gazes slip back to their boots and the blankness of the fog.

“I remember her hands,” the Knife continues murmuring dreamily some time later. “She pinched my cheek whenever she didn’t want me to forget something she’d said.”

Samuel clenches his jaw and tries his best to ignore him until his passengers disembark and he wakes from the dream, thinking of another mother whose hands will never hold her child again.

  
  
  
  


A day later, Corvo steps out of the _Amaranth_ and onto Kingsparrow Island under a bright overcast sky. 

As they set out from the Hound Pits together for the last time, Samuel had asked him what he remembered after the poisoning. Corvo told him of being captured by Daud’s men and fighting his way out of the Flooded district back to the pub, but he did not say how many he had killed in the process save for the Knife himself. Samuel knows the exact count. There is righteous anger simmering in Corvo that he hasn’t seen since bundling him exhausted and afraid into his boat from the sewers near Coldridge, except this time it seems that his will for vengeance has been fed blood and only grown hungrier. 

Samuel is old, and he has long since grown tired of the violence gnawing Dunwall apart from the inside out.

“Corvo,” Samuel calls a final time as his passenger slips his mask on and turns to leave the dock. The skull-like visage swings back to face him. “I’ve seen the drawings Emily makes for you. She looks up to you for how to act, sir, and I know you’ll see her safe and sound. Havelock and the others deserve what comes to them for what they’ve done, make no mistake. But I hope that the man who finds Emily is all of the man she deserves him to be.”

Corvo is silent for a long moment, the salt breeze billowing between them. He lets out a deep slow breath, some of the fraught tension easing from his shoulders. “Thank you, Samuel,” he says. “For everything.” And then he vanishes. 

Samuel is certain that he doesn’t remember his brief visit to that other Wrenhaven.

He reverses the boat and makes his way back out to sea until he can no longer see Corvo’s form flitting between the fort’s outbuildings. He will wait at a safe distance until he spots the man’s signal for him to return. The breeze dies abruptly and Samuel looks out to the horizon.

Fog is sweeping across the water, billowing and coalescing before his eyes. It makes no sense, not at this time of day, and Samuel immediately cuts the engine. He is unwilling to risk the boat’s hull on the jutting outcrops of rock that surround the island and lurk beneath the surface when he cannot see to navigate. He cranes back to try to catch a glimpse of the lighthouse if he can, but it’s already gone. The mist has enveloped the _Amaranth_ completely. It’s not until he feels the wet weight of it and the resonance of faint whalesong beneath the darkening waves that he realizes what’s happening, except that he is awake this time. He knows he is awake.

“Hello, Samuel.”

He snaps around. A figure stands over the engine box who he knows with immediate certainty is not and will never be a passenger. The pale youth floats two inches above the iron paneling with his hands folded behind his back, peering down at him with horrifying tar-black eyes. Clouds of ash swirl around him as though buffeted by a ghostly gale. 

“The Wrenhaven has flowed through this floodplain for thousands of years, though the name you call it by is a young one,” the man who must be Outsider says, turning to pace over the side of the _Amaranth_ and off into open air. “The people here used to burn their dead on the river in fine ships filled with whalebone and silk, thinking it would ease their crossing into the Void. Now the corpses are thrown in by the hundreds and swathed in little more than tattered sheets, but their bones settle in the deep beyond the river mouth all the same.” 

The god vanishes and reappears at the boat’s stern in a dark gust of wind that sounds like flapping fabric and feathers. He perches over the back of the bench there with one knee up, gesturing out with his hand. Samuel flinches back in surprise, his heart pounding high in his throat.

“Corvo does not believe himself to be a kind man. Perhaps he is right. But how he uses what I have given him falls to him alone, and he has made such fascinating choices.” Samuel feels the Outsider’s sickening gaze sharpen on him. “And yet no one truly acts in isolation, do they? You carry him on the water in the moments between rest and bloodied blades and dare to ask him for temperance. Would you call him a friend, I wonder? Would you trust him with what ran through your thoughts when you fought against the tide of the Void for him and then dreamed the next night to find your ferry full?”

The Outsider unfolds his lanky body to stand and Samuel senses a moment of pause. He is still vaguely in shock, but breathing in the mist of this other Wrenhaven once more and the idle of the engine next to him settles him gently into that familiar dream-like certainty. He knows he’ll be allowed to speak, if he wishes. A hundred questions burn in his chest but only one stands above the rest.

“Why do I dream about this place?” he asks the god. “Why do I take passengers? When we die, we vanish. There is no journey, sir. There is no ferryman.”

The Outsider cocks his head.

“Everything the Abbey teaches about what the Void is and was and can be would fill just a single cup from drawn from this river. You ferry death back and forth between the shores of the city, and so you carry his dead away as well. In the slums beyond Drapers’ Ward and inside the limestone walls of Parliament alike they whisper that the plague has a face, sent from the Void itself by my cursed hand to cut apart what the rats cannot reach and put Dunwall in its grave at last. They will never know how close they came to being right. There could have been so many more with fares for his ferryman, had Corvo chosen differently.”

“Then what about when it was Corvo here with me? That fault was mine.”

“Do you think the powerful men you've taken orders from since the moment you stepped aboard your fist ship have ever seen you as more than a simple sailor? Perhaps not. But the choices you make with or without a tiller in your hands have always been your own. And some of them have proved quite interesting.” The black-eyed youth flashes a crooked smile, an unsettling thing that suggests white bone and sharpened teeth. "Corvo's story would have ended that night in Rudshore had the Void had its way."

Samuel opens his mouth again to speak but the Outsider disappears in a crackle of darkness. He re-materializes out over the rippling depths, fog billowing away from him and swirling in his wake as he paces.

“How much of Corvo’s guilt do you think is yours to bear as well?” the black-eyed youth asks, gesturing expansively. ”And does the blame for how other men turn on one another when faced with the naked consequences of their actions fall at Corvo’s feet? The Loyalists harbor many vices, all of them well-worn by thousands of men who lived and died before them. Their stories are old, and they are drawing to a close. How many more passengers pay their fare tonight is up to Corvo, now.”

“One more trip across the river, then,” Samuel breathes.

“All things end,” The Outsider says, “and this time around I have watched with great interest.”

And then the god vanishes. 

Samuel is alone again. The fog bank rolls slowly back, returning the water beneath the _Amaranth_ to a deep shimmering blue and the vibration of whalesong fades away to be replaced by screeching seabirds wheeling over the rocks. He shakes his head to clear it, the sense of dreaming slipping away, and then engages the engine and swings around to face Kingsparrow just in time to catch the pale burn of a flare arcing high against the clouds. He has a pickup to make. 

He finds them safe. Lady Emily’s eyes are bright and determined as she exclaims and leaps into Samuel’s boat, regaling him with a flood of stories about the lighthouse and the Loyalists and how Corvo had rescued her. He nods along and clears a seat for her, but the one he’s really watching is her father.

Corvo stands high up on the rocks, bare faced with his death’s head mask slipped off and hanging loosely in one hand. His coat is tattered but mostly clean, his boots spattered only by mud. He tilts his head back slowly and closes his eyes just as a ray of sunlight finally breaks through the overcast sky and sets the water sparkling. Corvo holds his breath for a long moment, then exhales and lets his chest rise and fall in time with the gentle surf.

“Corvo, come on!” Emily calls after a while, and the all the love and hope that blooms on the man’s face when he turns to her makes Samuel think that there’s still a chance for this dying city after all. Corvo walks down to the boat and nods in greeting, and he smiles warmly back.

“Just say the word, sir,” Samuel offers, “and I’ll take you two wherever you need to be.”

  
  
  
  


Farley Havelock appears in the _Amaranth_ that night with a broken arm and half his skull blown away above the cheekbone. His remaining eye stares a thousand yards forward, his posture listless just like all the others that came before him as he flickers there and sways slowly with the waves. There is no one else.

“Pleasure to serve with you,” Samuel says, and gives an insincere naval salute to match his tone. He engages the engine and motors into the mist on the running tide of the Void one last time.

After that, he never dreams of the river again.

**Author's Note:**

> I love Samuel. Thanks for reading. <3


End file.
